My first report of the year, and I hope everyone's had a good holiday season.

That's right. It's 2017. A whole 'nother feelin'. The New Year. The future. Yeah ole daddy Earth fixin' to start one more trip 'round the sun and everybody hopin' this ride 'round be a little more giddy, a little more gay. Yep, all over town champagne corks is a-poppin'. Over in the Waldorf the big shots is dancin' to the strains of Guy Lombardo. Down in Times Square the little folks is a watchin' and waitin' for that big ball to drop. They all tryin' to catch hold of one moment of time. To be able to say "Right now! This is it! I got it!" 'Course by then it'll be past. But they all happy, everybody havin' a good time.

Whoops, got off on a Hudsucker tangent. But, suffice it to say, the new year is bringing some new projects and policies to the DJBWiki that I'd like to go over with you all. So, come along!

Possessions Policy

As has been stated previously, it's always been my intention to make sure the wiki fully supports all the work that Evant and his cronies have put into the possessions system. With that being the case, I've crafted and implemented a policy restricting what can and cannot be included on the wiki when it comes to possession-type items.

Calm down, there's no need to be so dramatic about it. The goal of these restrictions is to, in essence, make sure that people are going to interact with the possessions system moving forward. The amount of work that has gone into the system is staggeringly larger than any other single thing added to the Brotherhood since… forever. The Wiki could, if not monitored effectively, end up being a way for those people that don't care to use possessions to ignore the system and still have "their stuff". On top of wanting to make sure that the work of Evant and his team gets used, the other goal here is to maintain a sense of balance and fairness between members. Why should somebody that chooses not to use possessions be able to create articles on the official DJB Wiki about their star cruiser when comrades that can barely afford a cheap freighter cannot? The full text of the policy can be found here, but the pertinent points addressing what is and isn't allowed content can be found below:

Any content added to the DJBWiki as either an independent article or full article section must be an owned item within the Possession system. Articles and article sections must contain a link to the Possession item they reference. This can be done through the use of the [[item:]] link alias. Including the item identification number (the number on the end of the item page's URL on the Dark Brotherhood website) will then create a link to that item. Items that are not owned are in violation of this policy.

Possession-type items (such as starships, droids, etc) that are mentioned in passing in articles are not required to be owned through the possession system. However, any items, even those that are mentioned in passing, that are described as being owned by a Dark Brotherhood member must be owned within the possession system, or they will be in violation of this policy.

Additionally, any and all starship articles or sections contained within the wiki must have a corresponding Possession item, either a personal or Clan asset. The only exception to this are NPC owned starships that are specifically created or approved by a Clan Summit, Society Leader, Tribune, or Dark Councilor. Starship articles that are not possession items or otherwise approved as outlined are in violation of this policy.

Any articles that are found to be in violation of the policy will then be marked with the {{Possessions}} template:

The staff will endeavour to work with the member in question to resolve the issue instead of just remove things in most all cases, and the specific process of that works is outlined in the policy article. Many of the existing articles that this policy would apply to (especially personal starships) were actually addressed prior to possessions going live, so it is my hope that the implementation of the policy can be relatively painless as it will likely mostly be applied to articles created by mistake moving forward.

Wiki Projects

I've just dropped a whole slew of new projects on me and my staff. I'd had a few of these percolating since the end of November, but decided that I'd wait to bury people with new work beyond their normal duties until after the holiday season.

• Ship Audit/Canonizing: Lead - Selika. Auditing all past ships to either designate them as Legends content articles (with appropriate tags and categorization) or removal of Legends continuity info from those articles.
• Featured Article Audit: Lead - Laren. Auditing all currently listed Featured Articles for quality. This is primarily focused on going back and looking at the last ten years of Featured Articles to see which ones still up to FA standards. Those that do not will be categorized and identified by icon as former featured articles. This ensures that all articles contained within the featured article category will be examples of quality articles that can be modeled for new users.
• Construction Category Cleanup: Lead - Bentre. Reviewing all articles currently marked with the construction tag. Old articles that are partially complete will be marked as stubs, articles with little to no content (for example a character article with nothing more than an infobox) will be deleted, and current articles undergoing work or articles that are authored by currently active members that have seen edits more recently will remain marked as under construction. (Basically, there are over 500 articles marked as under construction, and it is my supposition that most of those articles are definitely not still "under construction".)
• HTML replacement: Lead - Xolarin. Many templates used across the wiki still use HTML formatting as opposed to Mediawiki markup. Those templates will be updated. Additionally, there are still pages on the wiki that date to the restoration of their content from Google caches after the wiki crash many years ago that still use HTML content. Those pages will also be updated to mediawiki markup.

Featured Articles & Wikipedian of the Month

This month’s featured article is one that is truly excellent (as should be expected from an author that was once a part of the wiki staff!). I'm sure a lot of those members that took part in the recent "Guests of the Matron" ACC competition might be familiar with this one, the Godless Matron. It's a really great addition to the Brotherhood's canon, and the article does a good job of comprehensively covering several topic areas, from inhabitants to locales, with great presentation.

As for our Wikipedian of the Month, this month that title goes to Elincia Rei. Elincia has been doing a good job starting to flesh out the new military forces of Clan Scholae Palatinae since possessions has gone live. It's a mountain of work (I speak from experience with Plagueis) that often times is thankless labor, but it's worth it to make sure that information is easily accessible and at the fingertips of the Clan members. Good work!

Final Words

Monthly Reminder: The wiki staff as a whole is always here to give you a hand with wiki questions. Hit us up on telegram (many of us are on there often/always/too much), and even if the staffer you catch doesn’t know the answer they’ll track me down and make sure you get an answer. We’re there to help you guys out, so don’t hesitate!

And remember, tune in next time for the next Wiki Report!